Reclaiming Menstrual Power

Esther Harding suggests that one of the reasons for women's menstrual disabilities and PMS today is that modern culture does not provide any kind of menstrual rituals. Menstruation is just each woman's private affliction, where she suffers alone; it has no positive value or meaning.

Women have been deprived of retreating to the ancient menstrual huts, where they could commune with their inner beings, attune themselves to cosmic cycles, and share in the secret knowledge passed on in the community of other bleeding women.

"In order to reclaim their menstrual power and liberate their bodies from menstrual pain, women must follow the cycle of the disappearing dark moon and enter into a voluntary retreat during their sacred time of month. Irritability, discomfort, and pain are the ways in which women's bodies continues to protest the menstrual injustices inflicted by society. Women's instinctual bodies demand that they pay attention to honoring the menstrual mysteries. The instinctual pull of the dark moon phase is to deliberately withdraw from the demands of others and worldly expectations. This step takes awareness and effort in a society that is constructed in such a way to deny and invalidate women's special needs during their moon times.

However, if a woman can find a way to take some time to be alone, in the bathtub, in bed drifting or reading, taking a walk in nature, praying or mediating in a sanctuary, she can reconnect to the deepest source of her feminine nature and psychic life. The body's craving to draw inward into quiet and stillness is a movement toward accessing the wealth of inner creative energy that peaks at this time. Women have the opportunity to transform this psychic energy into a flow of creative inspiration. A woman's moon time does not have to be an experience of depletion. It is when a woman stifles and blocks her pulsing, fiery red currents that the would-be creative energy turns to pain and depression. In a space of voluntary withdrawal, a woman can naturally remember or discover the ways to channel her red menstrual energy for a more fulfilling and richer life.

In order to redeem the dark moon menstruation gift of the Dark Goddess, we need to change our attitudes. Educating ourselves about the true nature of menstruation and the subsequent historical layers of distortion and suppression concerning women's blood mysteries is a starting point. We can continue the process by gaining new information about the body's physiological processes. This can help us to resensitize our awareness of our cyclical fluctuations. This knowledge can also enable us to evaluate the advice of the medical profession concerning our discomfort. We can experiment with herbs, nutritional supplements, acupuncture, massage, and other alternative healing therapies to alleviate the stressful symptoms of our bleeding time.

We can pay attention to identifying our habitual negative attitudes toward menstruation, and this awareness can liberate us from perpetuating society's falsehoods. We can cut through our concepts of menstruation as something dirty and undesirable by touching, smelling, and tasting our menstrual blood. In these ways we can reestablish our connection to the healing and rejuvenative powers of a woman's red elixir.

In Dragontime, Luisa Francia suggests a wide spectrum of rituals, ceremonies, and allies to help women reclaim the power and magic of their menstrual blood and to better use their menstrual abilities. Keeping track of our menstrual cycles and the phases of the moon can tune us into the monthly rhythm of our physical and emotional energies as they are regulated by the lunar cycle. By learning techniques of relaxation and meditation, we can induce states of trance, prophecy, inspiration, creativity, dream recall, hypnotism, and visualization. These capabilities are the birthright of the subjective feminine nature that are realized in menstruation. Finally we can take the risk of breaking the sexual taboo around menstruation by educating our partners, and thereby open our relationships to the ecstatic and transformative sacred dimension of lovemaking."

Many thanks to Demetra George for her permision to reprint this excerpt from her book "Mysteries of the Dark Moon".